To achieve the mission God has given us as a church, will not just take simple tweaks to our current methodology. What we need is a radical paradigm shift in our thinking.

<p>To achieve the mission God has given us as a church, will not just take simple tweaks to our current methodology. What we need is a radical paradigm shift in our thinking.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

FAST Missions

Daniel Vis

The School of Tyrannus

This morning I want to pick up where we left off last time.

If you recall the last couple messages, I talked about 2 things.

1, how God wants to do something new in New Albany.

He wants to do a new thing, something big, something remarkable, something we've never seen before.

And I want to encourage you to keep praying for that.

And then last week, I talked about how the key to real change is, anyone remember?

And the 2 levers that go into purpose mission and Vision mission being the work that God has given us to do and vision being our plan to get that job done Now today and next time that'll be in 2 weeks.

I want to explore this idea of mission just a little bit further and maybe challenge your thinking.

Well let's pray and invite the Holy Spirit to be here with us just 1 more time.

Father in heaven, we are here because you have called us to be here.

And this morning, we also want to know better how we can serve you and fulfill the work that you've given us to do.

Please Pour out your Holy Spirit, I pray in Jesus' name.

When we talk about mission, it's important to remember, from last week again, that our mission is given, it's not chosen.

It's a task that's been assigned to us and so we have to prioritize clearly discerning what our mission is.

We don't make it up, we don't choose it, we discern what our mission is.

If the mission is not clear or we have a faulty conception of what our mission is, then it's going to be very difficult to fulfill that mission, right?

So having a clear grasp of our mission is vital, wouldn't you say?

And yet, I would like to propose this morning that to some extent, at least by and large, we have sort of missed the whole heart of the mission as a church.

And in fact, I'm gonna argue that what we need is a radical paradigm shift.

They shape how you see things, how you view the world, how you interpret what is happening around you, the goals that you set, how you do things, the methodology that you use, the how you measure success.

It's driven by the paradigm that's in our minds.

And so if our paradigm is wrong, then it can lead to all kinds of problems in our ministry.

Back when I was in graduate school, I was studying the history of science, and I remember reading a very powerful book.

It was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I'm not going to talk about science this morning, just for a minute.

But it just happens to be that it was that book that popularized the term paradigm or paradigm shift.

We all know the word now, but at that time, it was kind of a new idea.

To summarize briefly what he wrote in the book, he said that scientific theories don't advance the way we normally think.

Normally, we think of them as making little small incremental steps as we discover things.

We said, no, the way science advances is when there's a radical paradigm shift in the underlying model that we use to understand the world in some specific field.

If you were to go back well over 2, 000 years, hundreds of years even before Jesus was alive on earth, the Greeks had proposed that the earth was a sphere at the center of the universe.

And everything that we see moving in the heavens, the stars, the sun, the moon, all of those things, they all are revolving around the earth, right?

And for hundreds of years, they took that model, that idea, and they tweaked and refined their equations and their formulas to where they got by the time here, 6 or 700 years later, they got to the point where they could accurately predict where the moon was going to be, where the wandering stars, the planets, of course that's what they call them, wandering stars, where they were going to be, when you're going to have an eclipse.

They could predict all of those things remarkably accurately.

In fact, Ptolemy, when he wrote his book The Almagest, and he kind of outlined all the current understanding of astronomy, that book was so accurate that for the next thousand years, no 1 even questioned the model.

And there was a man by the name anyone know?

And Copernicus, what he did is he said, you know, why don't we just reconsider the whole model the whole paradigm?

And why don't we put the sun at the center and we'll spin all the planets around the Sun Now to be honest his predictions were no more accurate than Ptolemy's He's the same kind of you know information the same kind of knowledge, but it was a change in paradigm right a change in the underlying model and Everything changed after that paradigm shift I mean a hundred years later less than that you have Galileo and then another hundred years you have Isaac Newton another hundred years you have Albert Einstein another hundred years you have a man on the moon, actually standing on the moon.

All of that followed because there was first a shift in their paradigm.

Now, Thomas Kuhn, in his book, he argued that every scientific discipline, and he gave examples in medicine, and electricity, and chemistry, whatever, every scientific discipline, they all advance.

When there is a paradigm shift, it's not little small incremental changes.

Is that if we are serious about wanting to fulfill our mission.

It's not going to take little small tweaks in our methodology.

I hope you guys are patient with me and understanding because I don't want to offend anyone this morning.

But let's talk about how we normally do evangelism.

We do it the same way, pretty much every church, right?

Church board will get together and they'll say, you know, we should do evangelism in our area.

And so the plan is we will bring in an evangelist and we will hold a series of meetings, right?

You've done it, I've done it many times in my church.

Let's say we wanted to reach New Albany and not just New Albany, but maybe the surrounding areas.

And so we're gonna we're gonna try and target 100, 000 people with the gospel.

Well, we figure we can get their mailing address and we'll mail them a flyer.

Probably 50, 000 flyers if we want to reach 100, 000 people, right?

That's not cheap, by the way, let me tell you.

But let's say we have the money and we do it, and we mail them out.

What happens to most of those flyers when they show up in their home?

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The School of Tyrannus

Transcript

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